CLEARING THE HUMAN MIND AS AN ELECTRONIC COMPUTER

A lecture given on 22 October 1951

Restoring the Ability to Decide in Present Time

Electronics engineers are very fond of saying, "Well, the reason I like big electronic computers is because they’re accurate. They don’t make mistakes; they are not like the human mind?"

And you say, "Well, look, the human mind is a pretty good setup too?" "Well, it makes mistakes; it makes too many mistakes. It’s no good. You’ve got to have electronics to do your computation and so on."

At this moment you say, "Well, who made and what made an electronic computer?"

This always manages to escape them— that the electronic computer is a product of the human mind.

If we look at the human mind as a computer, we find out fairly rapidly that it assembles material and derives new material from these assemblies, that it perceives the environment for the data in its problems (that is very tricky; I don’t know how you would make a computer do it), that it poses its own conclusions (answers to its problems), that it imagines problems with which to keep itself amused (I have never run into a computer that had to be amused, but the human mind does have to be), and more important than that, it is portable. This is a very interesting thing about the human mind: it is portable.

If you were to set up an electronic computer to do everything that the human mind can do, you would have to have a vast area of warehouses. It would cover block after block after block— more likely square miles. There would be cameras and processing equipment in there, and film manufacturing setups and film storage vaults for the three- dimensional sound pictures that have to be taken in technicolor with a field of about 120 degrees— which is a pretty wide- angle lens. There would have to be straight sound- recording equipment, with equipment to tell what the depth and distance of the sound was (binaural hearing) and some way to tape that up and cross- index it. And it would have to have some means, not yet found, by which it could feel things. It would have to be able to test moisture and so on. It would also have to have a complete battery of equipment which would run its own control board— something like a snake eating its tail. It would have to manage its own control board so that it could manage its own control board in order to manage its own control board, and this is quite a trick when you start setting it up in electronics. The whole operation would have to be circular. All told, it would be a very complex operation.

In addition to that, it would require enough power to light New York City to run this setup. For cooling, it would require the amount of water that flows over Niagara Falls. On top of all that, it would last about an eighteenth of a second before you would have to go over the whole unit again and replace a tube, and if vacuum tubes cost a cent apiece, it would cost a million dollars just to set this thing up with vacuum tubes.

The human brain is very interesting in that it runs on 2.4 watts. That is a fact. That is the amount of current that it takes to run the human brain— 2.4 watts. It has self- contained battery units; every cell has its own battery setup. And it is a very interesting kind of a battery at work there: it takes oxygen and chemicals and combines the two and gets electricity.

You could take potassium permanganate and oxygen and give it a catalyst of something like sulfuric acid and you would get electricity. They were working just before the war on ways and means of running submarines on chemical- electrical batteries. The chemical- electrical battery is pretty easy to produce, but our knowledge of it is so clumsy and it is so big and so impractical and it is so hard to store enough oxygen and a few other things that it was not carried forward. Maybe some day it will be. But it is that type of battery which the human brain uses. Every cell in the nervous system has this kind of a battery in it.

The nervous system has a switch relay system which is fascinating. The nerve synapses have to be at a certain distance apart in order to get a proper gap, a jump. The synapses come together and as they come together just that much, they get an arc across them so that you get a flow. But if they are too far apart you don’t get any flow, and if they are too close together you get a continual short circuit.

Now, you can vary the distance of the gap in the synapses— these little gimmicks on the ends of neurons. They are just like an electrical switch. If you take a knife switch and you push it down you have a complete closed circuit on an electrical circuit. These synapses work just a little bit differently in that they come close together but don’t quite touch and they get a current flow between them. When they touch, you get a short circuit. When these things are well adjusted you get optimum current flow through the brain.

All that this has anything to do with is the human mind’s putting everything it computes into action conclusions.

When the psychiatrists and the biologists get through studying the nervous system, all they have studied is the registry and action switchboard —the incoming impulse and the outgoing command across its relays. That is all that is visible.

I think this enormous, terrific apparatus that you would have to have electronically can be held in the human brain portably because actually all you are evidently carrying around in terms of weight and physical universe and so on is just the switchboard. Anybody can carry a switchboard around, like you could carry a walkie- talkie in your pocket. There would be nothing much to this.

When we say mind, then, we are not talking about brain. We are talking about mind.

Now, this gimmick that would require the power that it takes to light New York City: its comparable unit to your nervous system would be the switches which received the orders to move— start, stop and change action. That is what you are examining when you are examining a nervous system. These little cells, with their batteries and so forth, build up, translate and convert impulses. These synapses open and close— it takes a millisecond or so for a synapse to open and close— and what that winds up in is action. That says?" heartbeat?" so you have a set of synapses in there that are going?" tock- tock- tock- tock- tock- tock- tock- toc?" all during your lifetime. They are turning on and off the action— muscular contraction and expansion— of the heart.

You have a very complicated system, it is true, but all it is is a mechanical system. What we are looking at here is something as mechanical as a railroad locomotive, but without the engineer.

A railroad locomotive will sit there on the siding for a long time without any engineer. But you put an engineer in it and he starts pushing a few buttons— he converts his thought and computation and training and skill into action— and the locomotive moves.

So when we are talking about a human computer, although it can be paralleled by electronics, you can see that it can’t even vaguely be approximated in terms of magnitude by electronics at this time. Therefore, we are studying something we don’t have our hands on. And people made the mistake (believe me, it was a gross error) of comparing vacuum tubes, copper wire and all of their recording bric- a- brac and storage files, standard- bank files and all this sort of thing that you get in an electronic computer to the human mind. They thought that in your neurons, synapses, cells, batteries and motor units, you had the same setup. That is not true. That whole setup is just like the railroad locomotive; it has steam that drives the wheels, but if somebody doesn’t put a track there and if somebody doesn’t tell it where to go, it is not worth anything. It so happens, however, that this action switchboard we call a brain fooled people, because they thought they could reach in and push something and get a reaction. The first person to notice this was somebody who was experimenting, God knows how many hundred years ago, with frog’s legs. They put a galvanic battery on a frog and he kicked his legs, and they said, "Boy, this is science. Now we’ve got science!" and they were off to the races.

Housewives had noticed that for a long time. I don’t think it was what you would call a brilliant observation, because I haven’t known a girl yet, when I brought in a set of frog’s legs and if she had any experience with them, who didn’t scream faintly and say "Do I have to cook those?" The trouble with frog’s legs is that, when you throw them in a pan and generate heat, they kick, and this is very disconcerting. It is something like boiling lobsters. You drop a live lobster into a pot of boiling water and he certainly does make a racket. He doesn’t sound like a symphony orchestra either. Anyway, these frog’s legs kick around.

This was, of course, "adequate excuse" for psychiatrists to cut big chunks out of people’s skulls and stick probes in there to find out whether they kicked their legs or not. And they have done this experiment many times; they do it every few days in big institutions. They amuse themselves a lot. It makes the other patients laugh too, I am sure. They found, for instance, that if you stab a person in the back of the brain, the person sees images in reverse. Here is where the mistake comes in: They say "the thing which inverts the image" when they should have been saying "the thing which relays the command to invert the image" What they are dealing with is what carries the command— conduit wire and switchboards. So they get into this switchboard and trigger something back there and the person will see an image reverse. If you cut a certain portion out of the human "mind" the person then will not be able to translate words into sounds, or something of the sort. This is all very interesting.

They "know" that a person cannot recall smells. They have found this out through vast study. I had a psychiatrist get blue in the face because I said "You know, people can go back on the track and pick up an experience they have had, and they get the smell again?" "That’s impossible" "Well" I said, "I don’t know whether it’s impossible or not, but they do it?" "Hah! It’s impossible" "Well, why is it impossible?" "Well, because the olfactory nerve doesn’t go back across the occipital and so forth. It goes down this way and back there and so on, and naturally they can’t do it! There is no smell available." Somebody asked, "Well, look, if there is no nerve connection by which you can recall smell, then how is it that anybody can ever smell anything in the first place?" "Well, that’s obvious, but it’s not recorded." "Well, how do they classify it so they know when they smell a bad smell the second time?"

And we of course had gone completely beyond the logic of psychiatry, so we had to quit the argument. But two or three people in the room got curious about this, and they went back down the track a little bit and checked it out, and they found they could pick up these smells.

I merely point that out to show you that not even this postulate that the brain is an electronic computer can be carried out all the way, because not even what they have found to be connected and so forth bears out all the way.

So, let’s not be under any delusion about the magnitude of operation of the human mind just because it is small, portable and only requires 2.4 watts.

It evidently is running on a set of what we are calling theta facsimiles. Where these things are filed, how they are recombined and so forth is evidently, at this moment in the first echelon of Dianetics, none of our darned business, because if anything avoids scrutiny, the theta facsimile certainly does. But the theta facsimile can reimpose itself upon you with great ease; all you have to do to see this is run somebody back down the time track. But he is not going down any time track. He is going back through the theta facsimiles of past moments. If he gets into a moment of pain, a theta facsimile of pain gets shoved to him, and he can run it and he can exhaust it and he can evidently take this facsimile and fix it so that it will never have any effect on him anymore.

The point, though, is that it has just been dealt him. It is not stored in him. The standard banks and so forth, in other words, are not inside the cells. (If anything I have written tended to cause you to believe that, then if anybody will bring me a crow— preferably not too dead a crow— I will eat it! )

But the point is that you are not carrying around in your cells a whole bunch of electrical charges which are full of pain or are liable to spring out at you any moment. This is not the way the thing is rigged. You are not carrying around in your nervous lines and so on anything like a reactive mind or anything like that. But there is available to you, at your own choice, an enormous area of what you can call entheta facsimiles. I think probably everyone has many trillions of them.

What an underestimate! That is as bad an understatement as saying psychiatry isn’t very good. I think that is an underestimate of the situation, because it is probably trillions to the five- hundredth power, or some figure that you get by starting with a one at the upper corner of a blackboard and writing zeroes in small figures clear across, and you fill up this blackboard and you get another blackboard like it and fill it up, and you get another blackboard and fill it up, and you spend the rest of the night and all the blackboards in town and you haven’t gotten to the end of this figure— because there are lots of them.

Every time you sneezed and it was uncomfortable, an entheta facsimile was created.

It is very interesting that people create facsimiles of the facsimiles which are already created. If you remanifest an old facsimile, a new facsimile is created which contains the manifestation of the old facsimile. They don’t involve themselves or get tangled up, but a facsimile is made of their being involved. In other words, it is a very simple process of "Let’s take a shot of everything in sight at any given instant, and let’s just take a continuous record of everything that goes on, and then let’s file it. Let’s file it according to time and magnitude of importance, and then let’s run off a hundred new copies of all these facsimiles and file all those."

Of course, a human being born into a "sane, competent, conservative, quiet society such as ours, a society which has nothing whatsoever wrong with it in this best of all possible worlds" never really has a chance to get one of these old entheta facsimiles keyed in! They all just stay out automatically.

If that were only true!

What happens is that in the first moments of life a little pain is received, and the front board of the mind says, "Well, now, let’s see, what’s the explanation for that? That reminds me of this other pain received. Now, the reason I had to have this pain was because.. . Well, the devil with figuring it out now; we’re busy. We’ll just take this other entheta facsimile here— good- looking facsimile, it has a lot of pain in it; it says ‘body failed’— we’ll take this and we’ll just file that with the new one. Okay! Now, let’s go on our way."

And then a few minutes later it receives another flick of pain and it says, "Well, we’re too busy to go on with that now. The real reason why it happened this way, body, is because it just happened this way. Of course, this does compare to that other entheta facsimile that we had, so we’ll pick one out over here . . . yeah, that looks about like it. We’ll file that as being possible in this life."

And it can keep this up until finally you have a nice bin of these things which you have accumulated in this life that carries the total explanation of all the pain you have experienced in this life. But now that you have it, what do you do with it?

There are three or four things you can do with it. One is to use the original standard processing; you just go back to the beginning of the preclear’s life and chew these things up like a buzz saw. It takes you a long time, but you just desensitize all of these facsimiles. You take all the charge out of them and you take everything out of them that is in them. You take out the appendectomy and the time when he fell down and hit his knee on a nail, and you take out each one of these things and just nullify these facsimiles. It takes a long time, but it can be done. A few liabilities go along with doing it.

Or you can take it up with Effort Processing; you can take the triggers off them.

Suppose you were sailing along over a stormy sea and you were towing another vessel. If you wanted to get rid of it, you could go back to that other vessel and set fire to it so it would burn and sink, and then neither you nor anyone else would ever be troubled with that vessel again. Or you could simply go back to your own fantail and take an axe and cut the towing hawser. The other vessel would drift away and you would be free to go your way happily and unencumbered. Let’s say that the other vessel was something that you were towing under duress, that you didn’t want to have: you could cut it loose just by cutting its towing hawser.

Effort Processing permits the auditor to "cut the hawser" on all of these old entheta facsimiles. You don’t have to run them— just cut them loose. You find the effort which makes you have to have them and they get chopped off and go back into the bin.

That is very fast, but there are still lots of them. If you start doing this very much, you are going to find yourself quite involved. Dozens or even scores of hours would be involved before you got Clear.

There is an easier way to go about this.

Before the individual selected one of these entheta facsimiles and put it in the files, he made a conclusion about his environment. All you have to do is take the charge off all the conclusions, and all the entheta facsimiles float free. This is very simple.

Any time an individual concluded anything the first time, he started a chain of new entheta facsimiles which are very powerful and which are his conclusions. You get the basic off each one of these chains and the fellow then has no reason to call back these entheta facsimiles. It is as simple as that.

The individual begins as a self- determined organism. He starts out in life highly self- determined and then he runs into something that tells him he isn’t self- determined, so he has to find a reason why. He compares it to any data which he has available. This data very often happens to be an entheta facsimile, so he pulls it in and he says, "Well, this must be the explanation" and files it.

But remember, that entheta facsimile is not his boss. He and his own self- determinism are still his boss. He runs himself.

He goes along and he makes another conclusion and yet another conclusion and yet another conclusion. Every time he makes one of these conclusions he is tying down all the data which it took to make the conclusion. And this is where we tie into "how to clear the mind as an electronic computer?"

This is a very obvious subject. This subject is so obvious that one could bring himself up the tone scale just by thinking about the subject. I am not shooting the moon with this.

Sometimes an individual’s orientation with life, with MEST, is so poor that he actually should get that oriented before he tries conclusions with his own conclusions. But this game of trying conclusions is a very simple one.

Let me show you what happens to an adding machine. Let’s say that somebody for his own purposes decides "Well, the thing to do with this adding machine is disconnect the clearing button. Then we’ll get lots of big figures" So we come in to do the accounting, and 2 plus 2 is already on the machine— 4 is already on the machine. We think we have reached over and pushed the clearing button, or maybe we have but it didn’t work. So it leaves 4 on the machine.

We are assuming, as the operator of this machine, that the machine has been cleared, that there is nothing but 0 on the machine, and we are going to add up some new figures, but we don’t notice that this 4 is still on the machine. So we punch in the figure 2 and add 2, push the total, and we get 8.

That is very strange. We got 8. Now we try to make 8 work but there isn’t quite enough here to make 8 work. For some reason or other, we don’t see 8 units to represent this number 8 that we just got on the machine, and just exactly how we go about this we aren’t sure. So the best thing to do is to run up a new problem. That is the solution.

New problem: 4 plus 12. (We pushed the clear button, but nothing happened.) We get 24. It says 4 plus 12 is 24 but there is something wrong with this.

We go on anyway. We have to get these books added up, so we put down 24. Then we punch the clear button and we say, "All right, this next problem ought to be very simple. We’re going to add 2 and 2." We add this up and pull the lever on the machine and we get 2 plus 2 is 28. "Well, I guess times have changed." But we use this 28; we fix up these books with this 28.

Now, what we want to do is subtract 2 from 6 on the next problem. So we subtract 2 from 6 and we get 32. What? But we put it down in the books and just trust to luck.

About this time we begin to wonder if a crystal ball wouldn’t work better. It very probably would. So we go get a crystal ball. We look into the crystal ball and it says 2 plus 2, and we get a hunch that it is 5. That’s good. So we put it down on the books, but now we really have a mess.

Maybe Bill across the hall knows! So we go over and ask Bill. We say, "Now listen, Bill: We’ve got this next problem coming up here— it’s a very interesting problem. It says that you sell a book for $5.00, and it costs $5.02. Now, how much do you lose on every one of those books?"

Bill is very busy and he doesn’t think very much about it, so he says, "Twelve, of course! Twelve!"

And you say, "Huh? Twelve what?" "Well, just 12."

We try to compare this back. We say, "$ 5.00 and $5.02. There is something about 2 cents here. It’s plus or minus, I’m sure, on 2 cents" and we get 30. "There’s something about 2 cents— but he said 12. Well, my own arithmetic is no good, so I’d better take his. All right, we’ll just put it into the whole problem as 12. That’s much better; we’ve got an answer. That’s fine. Let’s take off from that."

Now we think we have a clear machine. We spend 15 cents a day for cigarettes. How much do we spend in four days for cigarettes? We put this into the adding machine, and we find that we spend $1.80 in four days for cigarettes.

That seems awfully high, but that, of course, is what it has to be, naturally: the machine said so and we have to trust the machine. But come to think about it, we aren’t getting along too well with the machine. "I wonder what Agnes up the hall would think on this problem?"

We walk in on Agnes and Agnes says, "What did you say about cigarettes? Well, don’t smoke, obviously!"

And you say, "That’s not the question. I wanted to know, if I spend for four days all of these cigarettes, then— then how much— how much do adding machines . . . ?" "Well, that’s all very clear, that’s perfectly clear. The thing to do is regulate the price administration, of course." "Well, how much would it cost not to do that?" "Well, that’s over three dollars and twenty- two gimmicks?"

And you say, "That’s good."

And that is what passes for thinking in our society. I am not kidding you! This would be horrible if it were not so funny, or funny if it were not so horrible.

The point is that this is the way the human computer works and this is really its only error. It is essentially a perfect computer, if the button is cleared.

Now, people go around making New Year’s resolutions; every New Year’s they make a bunch of new resolutions. If, instead, they went to an auditor and had all the conclusions they had made during the past year cleaned out, they would probably be able to start the new year and accomplish something. But just making a bunch of new conclusions "I’m not going to smoke" "I’m not going to sass my mother- in- law" "I’m not going to be late for work" "I’m not going to get that new television set" and so on— doesn’t work, because what a conclusion pretends to do, it doesn’t do. A conclusion pretends to be a new static.

The individual has a problem given him in the society. The mind is set up to do pretty high- echelon problems. It also does pretty low ones, but it does most of its problems in terms of action. It wants its problems in terms of action; it solves them the same way. So it looks around the society and sees all these factors and it adds up as many of these factors as it can use.

Actually, there is an infinity of factors in every conclusion; there are just too many things, so you grab the most important things— those that seem important to you— and you sum them all up and d ecid e to do something. You decide that this is what you are now going to do.

That gives you a static. That gives you a static from which you can jump off into motion. You put this static into action. This is a conclusion; this is a decision. A fellow thinks, "Well, I don’t know . . . I was going to take steak home to dinner. No, I don’t want steak and potatoes. Lamb chops cost too much, and besides, I had better not go home to dinner. I’ll eat out tonight with Mary." That is his conclusion and that is a static. But it has a lot of data behind it, and all of a sudden, instead of handling all this data, which is almost impossible to handle and integrate without making a conclusion, the fellow sets up a conclusion.

He jumps off from that conclusion as being the best conclusion, and actually it always is— the best conclusion he can reach with the data he has to hand, the best conclusion he can possibly get out of his knowledg’e and experience of life, what he has observed in the environment. He jumps off from this as a conclusion. It is a static.

So there is in every conclusion a little, tiny cycle of life. A person steps off from nothing into the motion of being a living being; he steps off from the static of not- being into the action of being. And so it is with thought. The individual steps off from the conclusion into the action.

Have you ever noticed a person thinking and trying to decide something? He was sitting pretty still, wasn’t he? (That is, except fellows like me who think on their feet.)

There isn’t any sense in this pose, by the way; it is just another conclusion that you have to be static in order to think of statics. I don’t think there is much action involved, actually, in running the computer. It has no wavelength, so therefore it must be frictionless, and there are a lot of other interesting conclusions about it.

I think that a fellow who was well swamped up on the conclusion basis would find out that his basic error is in the fact that he has to make a conclusion. Optimum thought is actually instantaneous, so that one would observe and know instantaneously what he was doing. But with all these conclusions on the machine already— all these other statics— one can’t do that. He has to try to sort out from the other conclusions, get free of these old statics, and go into a new motion.

The fellow has a conclusion on the adding machine; it says, "I don’t like black dogs."

Later on, he makes another conclusion; it says, "I like Mabel" But then this earlier conclusion comes in: "Mabel has a black dog. Well, I like Mabel. I wonder what’s wrong with Mabel. We certainly aren’t getting along well. Well, the thing to do— I’ve got to know more about women. I’ll play hard to get— that’s it. That’s what to do about the thing. Yes sir!" There is a new conclusion: play hard to get.

But she goes out with another fellow the next night. So he says, "Well, I didn’t get her because I was sick that night" (And there is where psychosomatic illnesses come from.)

The fellow thinks, "I couldn’t have done it. It’s not that my conclusions are wrong, because I can’t question my conclusions. If I question my conclusions, I’ll go mad! I therefore have to question my physical being. So it must have been some strange inability which I was holding on to that night, which made it so that she went out with another guy. It wasn’t my fault, it was Bill. Bill talked to me a long time that afternoon. And people, when they talk to me, they get me awfully tired. And so I went over and I wasn’t as spry as I ought to be, and that was the whole thing. The best thing, however, to do about the whole thing is to go and beat this other fellow up. Now, that solves the whole problem. I’ll go over and I’ll beat him up. Although I was sick that night, I will beat him up." —a good solution.

So he puts that into action, but he gets a black eye and very sore at the stomach, and then he has to make some kind of a conclusion to explain why he got beat up. "Well, I got beat up because I was upset about things, and it’s a conclusive fact that when a person gets upset and they’re in love, their left ear begins to ache. This is a well- known scientific fact." This is a conclusion which he posts in here at this place.

So now he operates on this one: "I’ve got to be careful who I fall in love with because I get an ear ache" —obvious, simple, sequitur.

Then he marries a girl and he keeps getting an abscessed ear. And it all comes along all right, until one day his little boy comes home and says, "Papa, can I have a black dog?" Then he hits bingo, reports to the local psychiatric hospital and gets a prefrontal lobotomy.

And that is the explanatory conclusion to end all conclusions. It was the physical being which was at fault, never the mental being.

That, in essence, is a problem in logic as it is practiced today in America.

Now, a little boy, when he is six, wants to be a streetcar conductor. What does it do to him when he is sixty?

A little girl, when she is seven, wants to be a Red Cross nurse. What does it do to her when she is twenty- seven?

A little boy finds out that he can best annoy his sister by breaking her dolls. How does he annoy his wife when he is married and has some children?

These are all very interesting questions, and they are very pertinent questions. As you work with preclears, you will find that the interest and pertinence of these questions is about the biggest push button you can get your hands on in a case.

It is pretty simple to do this type of auditing. Effort Processing is the process of knocking out the individual’s effort to be and not to be and so forth. An auditor who takes this road starts turning up conclusions. This is Conclusion Processing; you can call it Conclusion Processing or Postulate Processing, but it is still Self- determinism Processing.

Conclusion Processing depends for its magnitude on how much stuff you can recover from the case without having to get some effort off it. You will find that you will recover just so much off a case and then all of a sudden you are going to have to get a little effort off it someplace or another.

But it produces very marked effects regardless of any effort that you get off the case. If you go into a case just to the depth that you can go with Conclusion Processing on knocking out these conclusions without swamping up any effort, you will find that you have a much more able human being.

Let us, for instance, take a profession: the profession of selling. A salesman’s selling depends upon his self- determinism. That sounds rather odd, but it is very true. A person cannot be taught how to sell. The reason he can’t be taught how to sell is that he can’t be taught to have self- confidence. The reason he can’t be taught to have self- confidence is because he has conclusions and postulates that he hasn’t got self- confidence.

When you get an inaccessible preclear who won’t lie down on the couch and be processed, you are running up against that preclear’s postulates, conclusions and decisions. The only way you can get past those is to knock the preclear into apathy with regard to his own self- determinism.

Do you understand that? This person has made the decision that he is well. He has already made the decision, many times before, that he is ill. But he has made the decision now, as a static of great magnitude from which he is going to jump off, that he is well and he is going to be well from here on out— like " . . . it is standing on a mud turtle and it’s mud from there on down" He doesn’t want to hear anything more about it. He has made this conclusion— as most people have— and any effort to make him feel better tends to invalidate this conclusion.

And what is invalidation? A precise definition of invalidation is simply the statement "You and your conclusions are wrong" In other words, "You do not work or run yourself" Invalidation breaks on this one point: "You own and run yourself" or "You are owned and run."

The whole subject of invalidation is defined as an effort to convince other individuals that they are owned and run otherwise than by themselves, to convince them that they do not run themselves.

You can work this out very simply. You can take the ARC of a person’s self- determinism, and by leading the person to make conclusions and then proving those conclusions wrong, you can probably break him all the way down the tone scale to the bottom even more rapidly than you could by knocking him on the head and giving him a PDH engram. Lead him to make a conclusion and then prove to him that his conclusion is wrong, then lead him to make another conclusion and prove to him that that is wrong, lead him to make another one and prove to him that that is wrong, and if you keep this up on him for a while, he will be in pretty bad shape.

What is the mechanism, then, of invalidation? What is invalidation invalidating? It is invalidating the person’s reality, communication and affinity with self. It is anything which tells a person "You are not running yourself; you are otherwise handled" Any remark which effects that with the individual invalidates him.

It is making a contradistinction, then, with the individual. A remark which invalidates an individual inherently carries in it the statement "You are not motivated on the eighth dynamic, you haven’t got a clean concourse with existence at all, you are not in touch with your own dynamics— you are MEST" Invalidation says, inevitably and invariably, "You are MEST. YOU are some other organism’s MEST."

The question "Are you sure of that?" is an invalidation. It also is saying, "You probably don’t run yourself and you probably don’t have your own conclusions about this thing. And if you do have your own conclusions, you probably can’t trust them."

It is surprising that psychology never hit on this, until you look at psychology on a tone scale. Psychology said that it is neuroses and so forth that break up a person and make him what he is. That is just great: "If this guy is insane enough, then he will be a genius." In a pig’s left eye!

I can show you a lot of fellows who had been geniuses until somebody came along and convinced them they were MEST.

How do you start a fight with an enemy country? There are several steps to go through. We won’t worry about those steps, but they all tend toward the same thing: telling the citizens of country A that the citizens of country B really aren’t human and that they are not self- determined, that the people are run by something else in that country. You can shape up all propaganda under that heading.

If you want to write propaganda to get the United States enraged with Russia, just follow out along that line. Demonstrate that the Russian people are really good, kind people but they have no self- determinism because they are run exclusively from the Kremlin and by secret police. Therefore they are MEST.

Instinctively we know that people who are MEST are dangerous. If man has not been completely blind, he has noticed that people who are down the tone scale and so forth are kind of weird to have around.

In other words, the way to dress it up is to say, as they did in World War I, "The Kaiser is not a human being, he is a devil, and he runs the human beings in Germany— but those aren’t really human beings, they are Huns." The English propagandist sat back very self- satisfied; he had proven the point. They were Boches.

If we hauled out some of the propaganda that was used in the early part of World War I, we would probably laugh ourselves silly over the stuff. But people took it seriously. It would certainly be a comment on yesterday’s society if somebody were to issue that propaganda again; it would provide many a belly laugh.

They had things like a cartoon of a fiendish German soldier— with horns, mind you, shooting out beneath his horned helmet— who had a ragged sawtooth bayonet with which he had a Belgian baby pinned up against a board fence. It was very pathetic. And everybody said, "They are doing that in Belgium?"

Then the big invalidation took place, but what got invalidated? The propagandists got invalidated. They got invalidated so badly that they could hardly get anybody interested in another war. They got invalidated because something like a million or more American boys went abroad and they went into France. They found the streets dirty and they didn’t like it. They went over to Germany and they found the towns clean, they found that German girls washed once in a while and this struck them as something very strange. They found that the Germans, no matter how rough they were on the battlefield and so forth, would send forward medical units to take care of enemy wounded.

This was very funny. They hadn’t been told this; there was something wrong about the whole thing. So they concluded that Germans were human beings, and that was all they concluded. And having concluded the Germans were human beings— having already been told that they were not— and not being themselves willing to be that wrong in their own judgment, the American boys hooked it on to propagandists. So propaganda became a very unpopular subject, and it is relatively ineffective today.

Do you know that there are courses in major cities for children in the first, second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth grades on the subject of propaganda? They are teaching little children what propaganda is. I was fascinated. I stepped into a classroom in New York City and I ran across a little set of books and so forth, and I asked the teacher, "What on earth is this?" "Well, this is the course on propaganda?"

That course could have been codified a little bit better, but they were saying, "This is the way they lie to you!" They are teaching that in schools. If I ever saw anything healthy in a society, that was it!

Now, there were many things which had to get buttoned up in Dianetics, particularly the codification of material in order that it could be given to auditors so I could be absolutely sure auditors would do everything that I had done.

At this stage of the game, the clever propaganda trick would be to say, "Well, in view of the fact that you can’t understand very much and it is a very esoteric subject, you were really wrong on your first conclusions with regard to Dianetics. It was there all the time." I could show you sentences in the books which were ambiguous enough to tell you that Effort Processing existed in the first book. I could bluntly say, "You see, I was right and you were wrong about the whole thing" which would immediately drive you into apathy if you accepted it.

That is the wrong way to do it. People didn’t know the right way to do it, so they resorted to that.

Instead of that, I can just ask you to recall the first time you concluded that you knew Dianetics.

Recall the first time you concluded you knew Dianetics— the first time you concluded you had a command of the subject.

Now the first time you concluded you didn’t have a command of the subject. (audience reactions)

Now the first time you concluded that I was changing things on you too rapidly. (audience laughs)

And the first time you concluded you would accept anything more with grave reservations. (audience laughs)

And the first time you concluded that you must have wasted an awful lot of time on old processing, because new processing could do it faster (if you made such a conclusion).

Now, having gotten all that out of the way, we’ll go on to new conclusions.

That is how simple it is.

By giving you constant, continual conclusions as they existed at the moment, I could pile up other conclusions that would tend to invalidate your earlier conclusions. You would go down into apathy on the subject. And that is just what happens to an individual. He goes on this curve about all of life because he makes a conclusion and then somebody changes it on him.

But this hasn’t been going on just since man had language. This happens to be true of every environment. The test of any organism in any environment is whether or not it can change to control a new environment. Can it change to control a new environment?

And when any organism has accepted, as practically its sole weapon, its mind, it had certainly better learn how to change its mind to fit a new environment. If it can’t do that, then it is no good, because it is going to run on conclusions made to fit old environments. You know how older people sometimes get very set in their ways? You can’t give them any new data at all. You are trying to run a bulldozer in. But I don’t care how many bulldozers you ran in, you wouldn’t be able to accomplish it up against rock- bound conclusions. You are trying to give them a new conclusion, and that isn’t what you ought to be doing. What you should be doing is getting rid of their old conclusions, and you can dust those out just like nothing. It is very simple. You want to sell somebody Bigsby’s Lingerie, and he has been buying Cute Kitten Lingerie for a long time? There is only one way that you would get him to stop buying Cute Kitten Lingerie. That is to say, "Well, a fellow makes up his mind about these things and then times change." He will agree with this; it is a good, wide statement." You recall, for instance, the first time that you made up your mind about Cute Kitten Lingerie?"

The fellow will think a minute." Yes! Yes. Yes, I recall." "By the way, where was your store situated then?" (You are interested in his business.) "Oh, we were over here at Third and Main. Yeah, yeah, hm- hm. Yeah, I remember." "You remember, then, how you thought about Cute Kitten in those days? You remember how the society was on the subject of Cute Kitten Lingerie?" "Oh, sure! It sure liked it, didn’t it?"

Then you just simply say, "Well, now, here is your order blank. This new lingerie is much better, and the society now buys it?"

But you could sit there all day and show him samples, pictures of beautiful women and everything, and get nowhere.

There is nothing harder to think back against than an old conclusion, and there is nothing easier to get rid of, by processing and Straightwire. This is just a wonderful accident, as far as we are concerned.

These old conclusions are in there with chewing gum. They aren’t in there with anything like cement or nails or anything like that; they are just in there with chewing gum (like the way they put together wartime ships!). They are very easy to get rid of. They straightwire out very rapidly, because they belong to the person; he can do with them what he pleases. And each one of those things is self- determined as far as he can tell.

Now, it is a funny thing that although a person may have a lot of engrams and things underlying these old conclusions, he is no longer faced with the situation that he was faced with when he made them. But he is adding that old conclusion into every new conclusion, remotely close to the subject, that he makes. He is doing this crazy thing with the black dog that I told you about earlier. He will go on doing that for the rest of his life. He will get up to a point, then, where his answers are getting so wrong, where he knows they are so wrong, that he is willing to accept anybody else’s answer— at which moment he becomes MEST.

Completely aside from the physical effects of gravity, injury, cumulative existence, old blueprints and entheta facsimiles in the causation of old age and deterioration of the human anatomy, I believe that conclusions are the next best item that keeps a person old when he gets up in years, because there is no reason for a person to be old when he is up in years.

Do you remember when you were very, very young and you looked at all these fuddy- duddies around you that couldn’t understand you? They were moving too slow, you wanted to change them, you condemned them, you said they were in the road. The old men you knew that you did not like because they were in active combat with you, the old women who picked on you— do you remember your detestation of them and your statements and conclusions on the subject of the fact that they were old? They did not look good; they were not active." Why, look at her! She’s twenty- five years of age" (you would have said when you were about ten) "— an old hag." Then you get to be twenty- five and you have a conclusion in the bank that says "People twenty- five years of age are old hags."

As a young man trying to advance into the world and make the world his oyster (without even an oyster fork), you may very often have said, "Age hates youth, really. They won’t just let us get ahead. That’s all there is to it. Youth just doesn’t get along in the world. I want to be old. When I’m old I will show them. Youth isn’t the thing."

Then you get to be old and you grow a paunch and so forth; you can’t get around more than about three holes of golf without wheezing your lungs out.

You know the many, many fairy tales about the three wishes? What is very interesting is that human beings get their wishes; they get all of them, which is one of the most horrible curses that you could ever put on a race. They get all their wishes. They are their own wishes. They are the product of their own hopes or pessimism for the future, the second they reach that future.

These wishes are an enchantment, a black enchantment that a person lays upon himself quite unwittingly and unknowingly. But it is very easily undone, and what I am telling you about is how to undo it. It is just Straightwire, it is Repetitive Straightwire and Lock Scanning.

There is many a way that you can go about this problem of deaberrating a person as far as conclusions are concerned. Earlier techniques, you understand, are perfectly valid in converting an entheta facsimile to a theta facsimile. And remember that every conclusion you make is just another facsimile; therefore conclusions sometimes have to be desensitised and handled exactly as you handle locks.

They are locks. They are very interesting locks because they are statics. And even though when the little boy says "I will obey" he has been brought to a static point in his life, it isn’t as bad as when he decides at eleven years of age "When I grow up, I’m not going to have any children." He has looked over this enormous supply of evidence around him, his great knowledge of the physical universe and mankind, and he has said, "I’m not going to have any children. I wouldn’t be bothered with children."

Then when he is thirty he says, "I’d love to like my kids. Why can’t I have a good time with them?" It is a mystery to him. The one thing he can’t back up against is this conclusion. Sure it was made when he was eleven, but that is just tough. He is stuck with it until he gets back and knocks it out as a facsimile. When he knocks it out as a facsimile, that will spring the rest of the chain. He can just run the rest of the chain out. There is nothing to it.

The main thing is the point of decision or conclusion or postulate. Those are three categories that you want; you just want to get these off the case. And you don’t care what kind of conclusions or postulates they are.

Any time a person lives three minutes beyond any conclusion he makes, he becomes the effect of his own cause. He makes the conclusion, then he goes three minutes along and he is being affected by it. This is concomitant to starting an action— thinking "I will now eat" and then eating. A fellow says, "I will be an old man with a gray beard and everybody will respect me?" This is a different spread of time, but it is demanding action. The very funny part of it is that a human being with his own self- determinism can evidently postulate his own shape, size and activity, modified only slightly by the years. If you were to get a person’s self- determinism completely free, he could probably make himself into any shape or size imaginable. The Arabian Nights talks about the magicians, who could change themselves at will to this or that. Man has had this in mind for a long time. Of course, there are limits on such a thing, but a person can make almost anything he wants out of himself.

I was talking to a young lady and I jokingly told her, "Now, if you just keep up with Self Analysis for a long time" (she was in pretty bad shape), "we’ll turn you into a Lana Turner." She went ahead, and as a matter of fact, that did her a lot of good. She got along fine, because Validation MEST Processing is about all that you can hit certain levels of a case with. Orientation with the physical universe is very good. But, looking it over, I know very well this person has many times made the conclusion that she was ugly, so not all the Validation MEST Processing in the world is going to let her back up against her own statements, her own conclusions, because a person can never be made to prove himself wrong. He can only be made to go into apathy.

How does an individual get to take over another individual’s motor controls? It is when that second person self- determines that his answers are so wrong that somebody else has got to do his answering for him; at that moment he gives up his self- determinism and he hands his motor controls over.

Or one could prove to an individual that his motor controls had been taken over already— that his self- determinism was inoperative. That is what they do in operations. They take an individual and move him all around, and he is trying to self- determine, down underneath all the ether and so forth, that he is going to move and he is not going to move and all that sort of thing. He says, "I’ll now put my hands down and push all this away" but the second he does this somebody pushes him back in the face; his arms don’t move. He becomes to some degree convinced while he is in that state that he is not under his own command, so somebody else talking in his vicinity or moving him "prove" to him that he is MEST. At this moment you get the activity of an engram, and that is why engrams are active. They just prove to an individual that he is not under his own control.

Now, take postulates, conclusions and decisions: When a person has made those and they have been wrong, they have wound him up in trouble. The first thing he does is say to himself "I am wrong; I have been wrong" and then he looks around for some way to become right. There are various ways he can become right. He can go down and see Lady

Anne, the famous prophet. He can ask Mama (call her up long distance), "Mama, Mama, did you have a lover when I was in the prenatal period?" I have had that happen very often.

The fellow comes back saying, "No, Mama didn’t have a lover. That engram must be wrong." "When did you first decide Mama knew best?" "I never decided Mama knew best; she just always did."

Here is the human computer: It takes the data— the theta facsimiles of its existence— sums them up and creates a new static. Then it takes and sums up its existence again, and its existence now contains this new static, which is now an old static, and a new static is formed, always with these old statics as part of the new static. So a person’s conclusions are adulterated from the first decision he makes.

If an individual had enough sense to go on and make all the conclusions he wanted to make, do anything wild he wanted to do, risk himself in any way he wanted to risk himself, and then afterwards just sit down calmly and think it all over and remember all the things he decided to do or not to do, regardless of whether he thinks they were bad or good, and just bring himself up to present time on the thing— if a fellow could do that once a week— he would probably live at the speed of an express train. There would be nothing to it. And his thinking would be just as sharp as a bear trap.

Of course, you can make the conclusion right now that just because you have concluded something does not mean it is going to aberrate you. You can pick up these conclusions; these conclusions are perfectly valid, they are perfectly solid, you can operate on them, and you can go right on operating for some distance on them. But at any time in the future, if you find yourself the least bit indecisive, confused or questioning your own judgment, for God’s sake, go back and swamp up the conclusions and just knock them out, and all of a sudden you will find yourself no longer so indecisive.

All of this has one other thing with it. You have asked the person for the conclusion; it seems to you to be a rather irrational conclusion and it seems to him to be irrational too. He will puzzle around about it, and he is making a conclusion that he must have been wrong, so you have got to give him an excuse to be right. You say, "Well, why did you make that conclusion at that time?" Then the conclusion will spring. Don’t try to prove to an individual that he has concluded improperly, because the chances are the individual was doing the best he could in his environment at the time. The real error is that he is no longer in the environment that he was in when he made the conclusion.

For instance, when you walked into the room you are now in, you walked into one environment; you are now sitting in another environment. What changes an environment? The tick of the clock changes the environment. Time is one of the things that changes the environment, or changes in the environment.

Later on you will go into a different environment. It may appear to be the same environment; it may appear so static, or randomity so lacking, perhaps, that it appears to be the same, but it is another environment— because you are confronted with different problems.

So, when you are doing Conclusion Processing, throw this one in: "Well, why did you make the conclusion at the time?" The fellow will think later and earlier and all of a sudden hit some factor, and he will probably hit a whole new chain of conclusions. You just run into that factor and all of a sudden he will say, "Why, yes" —that was why he made it at the time.

What you are getting is an instantaneous recognition in present time that the reasons and causes for making the conclusion are no longer valid; they no longer apply. A person will keep the conclusion so long as he believes its conditions apply. So what the conclusion is, actually, is a bundle of sub- conclusions and the conclusion. You have the reasons for the conclusion and the conclusion filed all together.

So just getting up the statement "I hate women" is not enough unless you get its sub- conclusion "Women are mean to me; therefore I hate women." The conclusion doesn’t come up if you get just "I hate women" "Women are mean to me" has to come up too.

You say, "All right, you said to yourself at that time, ‘I hate women. ’ Now, what had happened?" "Nothing had happened— nothing. I was standing there and I just made the conclusion." "Hm- hm. What else were you doing at the time?" "Nothing. I was mainly interested in playing chess, if I remember rightly, during that period of my life." "What women did you know during that period?" " Oh, none." "Hm. You’re sure you didn’t know any? Well, when was the last time you felt that you should hate some woman?" "Oh, just the other day I was talking to a saleslady, a mean- looking saleswoman. She had black, straight hair and everything else, just like that old girlfriend I had back— yes! Yeah, I remember; she had just left me the day before, ha- ha."

So, one girl leaves and he concludes, "I hate women!" He will hold on to it, unless you get the excuse. He has to have one. Do you get the idea?

That there are three varieties to these things doesn’t alter the problem. First is a postulate. That is a person saying "I am going to do something" That is postulated action." I am going to be something" "I am not going to be something" or "I am going to change something on some dynamic or other" —these are postulates. It is a statement directed wholly at the future. Though the future may be only a split second from that postulate, it is still future.

A decision could be said to be something which is a categorising of material and future action. A person makes a decision by assembling a lot of past data precisely aligned on one subject, and decides that the future on that subject is going to be so- and- so. That is a decision. That is a decision that facts will be assembled this way and actions will take place this way.

And a conclusion could be said to be a static which is posed concerning a state of being— a current state of being.

A person doesn’t necessarily conclude according to these definitions the way we are laying them out. He doesn’t conclude he is going to do something into the future; he just simply concludes that something is the case. He has made a decision on a past or present state of being; he concludes something is the case. In other words, he crosses off its past computations.

Now, it doesn’t matter whether you subdivide these things or not. As far as processing is concerned, they are all the same breed of cat. They more or less add up to the same thing but they give you a more particularised definition of what the person is thinking about.

These are never made without cause. There is something in the environment or in the person’s past that causes him to make every conclusion, postulate or decision which he makes; they are always made with cause. They don’t completely spring unless you get the cause. That is what makes it tough to get postulates out of a past death— they come up by themselves, alone, and you haven’t got the data of the life to go along with them and prove them up.

But they can be gotten up anyhow; they can just be desensitised with the rest of the entheta facsimile in a sledgehammer fashion. In such a way you can knock out any conclusion if you just want to process it without reason. So there are various ways to handle these things.

Anyway, let’s just call them all conclusions. Conclusions sounds more like the static that they are— a person concludes that life is.

What is the common denominator of conclusions? There are three: "not to be" "to be" and " to change" on each dynamic— one, two, three, four, five, six, seven and infinity." Not to be" "to be" or " to change" : any conclusion, decision or postulate— or, as we will call those as a group, conclusion— is in that category. It is one of the three; there are no more than that.

"Not to be" is to stop." To be" is to start." To change" of course, is to change. In other words, in order to "not to be" you have to stop. Or in order to make something "not to be" you have to stop it. This is very, very obvious; the only reason anything is, is that it has motion. In order to make it "no" you just take the motion out of it, so you have to stop it. Any time you want a state of not- beingness, it requires stopping. Sometimes you have to start a destructive action to stop it, you understand, but that is getting into the combinations of the three.

In order to get a state of beingness, you have to start something or add more motion— an impulse of more motion— on any dynamic. That is "to be" —more motion on any dynamic. We are answering Shakespeare’s question, by the way "To be, or not to be: that is the question?"

Now, as far as "to change" is concerned, this takes care of an action which has been started, and is an alteration of that action or an alteration of its direction— in either category— or something which you are trying to stop and you decide not to stop it anymore. That is a change— a shift of emphasis, a shift of shape and so on.

Those three actions— action "not to be" action "to be" action "to change" —are the three possible decisions a person has on any one thing. So if you find it impossible to get into a case very easily on the subject of conclusions, just find out when he stopped his car last, or find out when he started his car last, or when he started to walk and when he stopped walking or something like that, because you are getting in toward decisions with that. A person has to make a decision to start and to stop before he starts and stops.

Now, affinity, reality and communication are the only three categories of decision. Let’s take these in order, and first we will look at?" not to be?"

First, we have A— affinity. This is very basic decision making. To stop affinity on each dynamic is one whole category of conclusion— the decision to stop affinity on each dynamic (also, there is the decision to start affinity on each dynamic and the decision to change affinity on each dynamic). "Stop" includes such decisions as "I won’t like myself anymore" "I’m not going to like children" and so on. Those are "stop" decisions on affinity for the first and second dynamic. The third dynamic would have "I don’t like those boys down in the next block" That is stopping, because a natural impulse is to like them. The decision to stop agreement on every dynamic is the second category —the decision to stop agreement on every dynamic. That is reality. The only reason we have a reality is we just agree there is, so there is one, and we find agreement will work out along this line. Therefore, to stop agreement on any dynamic gives us such things as "I won’t agree with myself anymore. I’m too greedy. I eat too much candy. I’m going to stop myself from eating candy. I don’t like the way I eat candy, and my stomach wants candy and I don’t want candy. That fixes me." That is a conclusion.

Let’s say a little boy gets sick at his stomach for some reason or other. He shouldn’t get sick at his stomach for any reason at all, but for some reason he gets sick at his stomach. He has made a decision to be sick at his stomach over candy, and he blames the candy. Then he is out of agreement with himself. (By the way, do you note that the word is "the stuff disagreed with him")

The decision to stop communication on any dynamic is the next category. You understand that communication contains, basically, perception, touch, sight and sound. Communication isn’t just talking. Handling this will shoot out glasses and things like that.

The next category would be the decision to start agreement on any dynamic, to start affinity and to start communication on any dynamic.

And then we have the decision to change on reality, the decision to change on affinity and the decision to change on communication.

For instance, what happens to the young writer? He has made decisions to stop communication often enough that he doesn’t write. It is very simple.

What is communication? Communication is refusal to touch, refusal to look at, refusal to receive touches, refusal to receive looks, and so on. Remember that there are two sides of this picture: "receipt of" and "outgo" on every dynamic.

You want to know what is wrong with the fellow? Let’s say that when he is very young somebody decides to take his tonsils out. So they lay him down and put a mask over his face and pour ether on it, and then they pry his mouth open and reach in with a wire and start snipping. He starts trying to pull away, although he is?" unconsciou?" (everybody knew he was unconscious and couldn’t record). He tries to pull away in one direction and then he tries to pull away in another. What is he trying to do? Get away from pain? No, he is trying to break communications. What is communication? A wire on a tonsil, a doctor’s hand on the chest— that is communication. He is trying to stop communication, but he finds out he can’t do it! So his postulate, his decision, is "To heck with this— stop communications immediately." That is his decision.

His action is to pull away, but there is a chair in back of him, a bed in back of him or something of the sort, and he can’t get away. His hands are being moved and he is being pushed down and this way and that, and he is not under his own control. He is invalidated. He isn’t in command of himself, so he goes into apathy.

Later on he meets some doctor who says, "Well, the reason you have ulcers is because . . ?" Actually, it was because one of the doctors during the tonsillectomy— this fellow’s earlier colleague— had an elbow in the patient’s stomach.

I think doctors knew this all the time, by the way. I am sure they had this all worked out. The doctor leans his elbow on this young would- be writer’s stomach, and he grinds this elbow down while he is holding the patient. Later on the fellow has to be operated on for ulcers. You can make more money this way and send your children to better colleges. You create the somatic in an earlier engram so that there will be a later engram. Then they say, "Ah, the reason you have this is . . ?" and they take his teeth out and his eyes out and his appendix out and his head out, and when they get all through they have taken him out, and they get their commission from the undertaker.

Anyway, this young writer, later on, is doing fine. But one day he gets a sore throat while trying to write. His throat gets worse trying to write some more. Life is getting tough— he is finding it harder and harder to write. What is he doing as a writer? He is trying to communicate. What has he got? He has a tonsillectomy in restimulation where he was trying to break communications. So he will actually really fix himself up. He will write stories lousy enough so they won’t sell. That breaks his communication line. He will do all sorts of things that way.

But remember that writing, talking and all these other things solely depend upon a person’s belief in his ability to do so, because that is the first static. The first static says "to be, ‘I’" which means automatically "I have ARC on all dynamics; I am perfectly capable."

Every organism is born into this life with a control center which has a cleared board— zero conclusions. This is an important datum to you in this Conclusion Processing. It moves into this life with a control center containing zero conclusions.

The organism can reach back and pick up entheta facsimiles from anywhere it wants, including the genetic evolutionary line; it can pick these things up and put them into restimulation. Yet if a person hadn’t received any engrams in this life, you could just conclusion- process those things out of existence in an hour. It would be no trick. But he picks up new conclusions through the engrams in this life, so that some of that has to be knocked out with Effort Processing. However, you can get about 90 percent of the job done just on straight Conclusion Processing.

So, this system gives you all possible conclusions. When did one decide this and decide that?

Now, the reason memory is occluded in early youth is that, to begin with, his parents moved him around. He doesn’t make a decision to move, but he gets moved. He is lying there, and his decision is maybe to lie still; he is just thinking, "I’m lying still here, I’m enjoying life" and all of a sudden somebody moves him, picks him up, changes his elevation in the room, changes his muscular position, his motor- control switchboard, and he says "Waaah" And they say, "Oh, that’s all right, dear" —crunch. He tries to break communication now; he doesn’t agree with this.

If you want to pick up and open up large swaths of youth on the subject of Effort Processing, all you have to do is pick up these efforts of the child to get away from parents or to keep from being pulled around one way or the other. Pick up his own efforts to do this and you will start opening up big sections of his life.

Another one is to pick up all the times when he agreed to obey somebody. You just pick up all the times when he agreed to obey somebody and you will pick up all the times when he admitted he was wrong, because his agreement to obey was also his admission that he was wrong. It works that way. He gives up his own self- determinism when he obeys, therefore he goes down to MEST actuality instead of theta actuality.

There is a MEST ARC. There is cohesion and adhesion in the line of affinity. There is intermingling of electrons, protons, chemical compounds and so forth, and this is agreement. And there is the fact that matter and energy fluctuate in time and space and you have a sort of a cosmic communication of energy with time, space and itself. So, as a person goes down from ARC on a theta level, he goes down into this MEST triangle of "obedience." His perceptions shut off where he has been made to obey and where he has agreed.

Now, in later life we can look at a salesman; he is in bad shape because he is on an enforced- agreement basis all the time. So is the young writer we were just talking about. If he doesn’t write, he doesn’t eat. That is enforced communication, which isn’t good; it brings him down the tone scale on the subject. That is why the longhairs down in Greenwich Village are saying, "Well, you mustn’t ever write for money if you ever want to write." So they don’t write, and they have their theory but they starve. But that is all right— they are happy.

The fellow uptown who is making his coffee and cakes with writing is on an enforced- communications basis and he does write, and he does eat and he does get some copy out, so I think he is a little bit ahead of the game. But they both lose.

Anywhere along the line, a salesman is anxious to sell something, so he starts agreeing; he will agree with this person and that one. He walks in and thinks "What a jerk this guy is" about this fellow sitting at the desk. That is his private thought. Then he finds himself involved with the fellow: "Well, then, how are you, Mr. Smithereens? Yes, yes. Well, how’s the missis? Oh, that’s right, I forgot you weren’t . . . That’s too bad, that’s too bad." and so on. His thought is that he has got to sell him.

But he has made the postulate to himself "I really don’t like this guy" and then he makes himself wrong by going into agreement and forming affinity with him. So the salesman goes down lower and lower into apathy. You will find that anybody who has been selling for a few years is practically in apathy. All you have to do is just pick up these contradictory decisions and he will finally get up to the point where he can again evaluate human beings. Otherwise he gets down into the MEST bracket.

So, with this all- possible- combinations idea on Conclusion Processing, you can start an individual out very early on the time track." When was the first time you decided to like anybody?" You can try it for various dynamics until you hit something. You won’t get the first time— hardly ever. But you start on the various dynamics. You say, "When was the first time you decided that God was good to you?" That takes care of the eighth dynamic. Then, "When did you decide that there might be good fairies?"

And the fellow says, "What? Me decide there were good fairies? Oh, wait a minute, I did. Yeah, yeah, in first grade. I had a book on fairies; I thought that would be awfully nice to have. But what the heck— gee, that’s a long time ago!"

Then you say, "Well, now, why did you decide that you liked fairies at that time?" "Oh, I didn’t have any reason at all, I just— there was the prettiest little girl in this play. You know, it’s funny, I’ve never thought about that. But boy, she was beautiful; she played the part of Tinker Bell in Peter Pan. Yes, I was very enamored with her." "Well, what did you conclude about fairies?" "Oh, I liked fairies. I liked them a lot. I remember I had the part of a chimney sweep or something of the sort, or the alligator— I was the alligator. That’s right, I was the alligator. And I remember standing back in the wings there and saying to myself, ‘Boy, she sure is pretty. Yeah. ’ You know, it’s a funny thing, my first wife looked a lot like that girl, now that I think about it. We’ve been divorced now about five years— but, yeah, she never lived up to my expectations somehow."

This poor girl, who probably had the ideal of being a devil, married a man who wanted her to live up to his expectations of being a beautiful fairy with gauzy wings. Both of them are hard- boiled, sophisticated; they work for an advertising agency. They don’t even know this sort of thing exists in the bank. And they decide, out of "Freudian photosynthesis" (a new kind of Freudian psychology whereby you take pictures of their big toenails) that they have a certain incompatibility and that the modern thing to do is to get a divorce, so they do. That is the way it goes.

You will find human beings of forty, fifty or sixty years old going along on the illusions (and maybe they aren’t illusions) and the decisions of their early childhood when the world was all in bloom, gorgeous and lovely, when everything was running just as they wanted it. Of course, human beings were in the line, but what the dickens were these people? They weren’t real. The world was real, and they made these postulates to themselves of what they were going to be and what they were going to do with their lives. And the whole reason the individual is in apathy is he has never been able to be a streetcar conductor or Buck Rogers or Superman or somebody. It is fantastic, but this is computation on cases.

When a child is young he will think of being most anything. People laugh "Yeah, I remember when I was young..." Of course, the fellow isn’t thinking about being young at all. He has some kind of a vague idea of what it was like and what he thinks he was. He isn’t trying to remember his decisions, conclusions or the reasons around them. He thinks to himself, "Oh, I remember one time I wanted to be something silly; I’ve forgotten what it is now, but sure. Ha- ha." But you notice with this fellow that every time a fire engine goes by, his ears go zing! "I wonder what’s down the block?" You see him looking at the firemen as they are rushing around with their hoses and ladders; he gets very excited for a moment, and then he sighs. He is a very valuable business executive, and he wouldn’t think of going up a ladder. That is beside the point; his environment has completely shifted. But for forty years this fellow has been doing nothing but being in apathy because once upon a time he wanted to be a fireman and he found out he couldn’t be.

He hasn’t anything to do with firemen now. It doesn’t even compare with his existing reality. But he as an individual is being subjected to his own causes. He caused a future for himself; he said, "This is going to be my future reality." and now it doesn’t exist. Now it is not possible for this to be his future reality. He goes into apathy.

Any time an individual makes a decision for the future and fails to live up to it or fails to reach it, he fails. But that is what failure is— not answering up to your own postulates. That is failure. That is the only failure there is. It isn’t failure in the eyes of others and it isn’t the failure that you haven’t got eight million bucks. I have known some very happy hobos.

Let’s say a child was born and he somehow or other crawled through his early years, and along about three or four he looked up and said, "I think I will be a happy hobo." He went to school and still thought he would be a happy hobo and he finally ran away from school saying, "I think I’ll be a happy hobo. "He never wanted to be anything but a happy hobo. So he went out on the road and he ate garbage and never had much food and he lived in rags. But he was a happy hobo and he died at the age of 110, a happy hobo. A person would be fulfilling the cycle of his own life if he went out on such a line.

But you know what they do to you when you are a child: You say, "Well, I want to be a fireman?" "Well, dear, you don’t want to be a fireman. After all, being a teller at a bank is a much nicer thing. I mean, that’s good; the guy wears a white collar."

And you say, "I want to be a fireman, I really do." "Well, it’s very dangerous and besides, dear, it’s very hard to get to be a fireman; you have to pass all these examinations and everything else. That’s silly." And then she tells the knitting society that comes in, "You know, Billy is very silly: he wants to be a fireman. You know, he has these childish reactions?"

She has invalidated a dream that is very beautiful and real to him, and he goes around that room saying to himself, "Nobody believes I want to be a fireman (sniff)." He hasn’t any data in the first place.

The way we fix our children up today, when you and I are about eighty or something like that, we are going to find a whole race of people that we are going to have to start processing Superman out of, because there are very few children alive today who will be able to live up to X- ray eyes, flying through the air with the speed of light, smashing down brick walls with a fist and so forth. There are very few alive today who will be able to do that. But that is a basic postulate.

Children communicate very easily; the trouble with grown- ups is that grown- ups don’t, so they think children are hard to communicate with. That is silly. You can communicate with any child you want to. You just say "Hello?" and he says "Hello?" And you say, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" Don’t talk down to him "Well, sonny, what do you want to be when you grow up?" Just ask him, "What do you want to be when you grow up?"

And he will say, "Well, Buck Rogers." "That’s pretty good. That’s pretty good. What are you taking?" "Well, when I go to college, I guess I’ll have to be an engineer or something or other. But he sure has a good time, Buck Rogers does. I won’t have any women around me, though, the way he does. They’re no good, you see?" "Well, that’s fine?" and you walk on down the street. The child doesn’t think anything of it— somebody stopped and talked to him, that is all— but you can get an awful lot of data this way.

It is very early in a life when a child first begins to postulate his futures and goals. There isn’t a person around who didn’t have a completely mapped and laid- out future when he was two and a half; he had it all figured out by then. Now you don’t even know what it is. But you could find it just by processing back to it, getting the layers of it off. You could find it very easily. You could find the exact moment when you made the decisions and the exact reason why you made them.

It was probably because Mr. Jones down at the corner was awfully nice and he smoked big cigars, and the only way you could smoke big cigars was to sell silk stockings— something "logical" like that. And you still have an urge to smoke big cigars, but you found out they made you sick; that was apathy number one. You find your whole life all caved in because you can’t be that. And that is very interesting.

You want jumps in tone? Just start straightwiring back to basic purpose and find out what it was. What were your first postulates? What are your ambitions? What are your dreams? What did you have to apologize to yourself about not having fulfilled?

The bumps and the earaches and the bad teeth and the glasses you wear and so forth are just apologies for never having lived up to your own dreams. That is a very poetical fancy perhaps, but I can show it to you with the hard, rock- bound finality of looking at an adding machine.

How you get a computer to go on computing with all the old computations and conclusions still on the tape, I don’t know, but everybody expects his machine to work. It doesn’t have a self- clearing mechanism unless you want to think back over your life introspectively every once in a while and blow these locks, or unless an auditor will blow these locks for you. When you get up to the state you are in now, it takes quite a lot of blowing. It would pay very highly to blow them.

Now, you will find that you have used your own experiences. Maybe you had an operation; maybe it was a bad operation and they just mangled you and everything. Then you healed up very quickly. That operation never would have bothered you for a moment if you hadn’t had a good reason to reach back, pick it up and bring it into restimulation. And the reason you reached back and picked it up and brought it into restimulation was because of a failure. You failed somehow, so you say, "Well, this is the reason I failed." and you show it to people.

The penalty of being human includes the necessity of demonstrating to other people that they can contribute to you, so you have to show people every once in a while that you have to be cared for.

Furthermore, when you were very, very young, you had to be cared for. Your motive power was pretty bad when you were one month of age; you could not possibly have gone out to the icebox and gotten yourself a bottle of milk. Worse than that, you couldn’t have gone and gotten ahold of a cow and milked it. And furthermore, you couldn’t have managed a dairy farm in order to take care of the cows and all this, unless you had Mama in good shape. If you had Mama there, you still needed another human being.

The point is that the fixed idea of dependency on other human beings sets it up so that an individual goes on postulating reasons why he needs human beings. So he goes on trying desperately to be a part of the human race.

The reason ARC is normally low in an individual is not so much because of his own aberrations as it is because it has to be for him to stay in concourse with his associates. So you automatically have to shoot your ARC down. You find yourself one day going around apologising for yourself and apologizing for your decisions and so forth. All you are doing is pulling your ARC down to a point where you can stay in communication with the people you are with.

I find myself every once in a while asking for somebody’s opinion. But if anybody’s opinions are good and valid, they will bring them up without my asking for them and it then becomes teamwork. They will say, "I’ve got an idea that this ought to be carried out in this way." and you either think it is good on a practical basis or you think it is bad on a practical basis. You don’t accept it merely to be a part of the human race.

And yet you can skid on this occasionally and find yourself suddenly saying, "Yes, I think that’s a fine idea" when you think it stinks, you think it is horrible. You are sitting there yourself thinking, "My God, how can this possibly be? This guy wants us to put up these pink pincushions all around the reception desk to keep people’s elbows off the reception desk, and I don’t believe it’s a good idea?" Yet you say, "That’s fine. That’s fine." Why? Because the whole illusion is that you have to stay in communication with the human race, otherwise you are not going to be fed. Furthermore, the handiest way to convince people that you have to be fed and taken care of, that you are a human being and that you are part of the human race is to be sick. That renders you non- dangerous. Being sick is only a demonstration that you aren’t dangerous to somebody else. Wearing glasses is the same thing. You "have to" wear glasses; that convinces other people that you can’t see as good as they can and therefore you are a friend of theirs. Stupid, isn’t it?

And yet you get this concatenation of conclusions that little by little keep sneaking up on you throughout your life, until every decision you make has a background decision of 985 trillion decisions that you have made before.

Now, there is a handy device that you will find human beings every once in a while employing. They know instinctively that at the beginning of a life they have a clear computer; there is no total on it. They put their first total on it. So they will do some weird trick like saying, "Well, I’m going to start life all over again. I’m going to go out West and start life anew." ; that was what they used to say about fifty years ago." I’m going to just wipe out the past, and now I’m going to start life all over again."

Of course, they can’t really do this unless they completely change their environment, throw away all their old possessions, cut all the old ARC ties with existence and so forth; then they could postulate to themselves "All right, I am now on a new computer?" And they would be! They would probably be well, healthy and cheerful and would probably go along for years until this concatenation of arbitraries tripped them. Because that is all that is: it is Logic 7, about the introduction of an arbitrary. It is just the introduction of an arbitrary. Every one of these conclusions is an arbitrary.

And the reason they are arbitraries is very simple: It is because they apply to the moment when they were made, and there will never be another moment like the moment they are made. Therefore every decision and conclusion that you have made in your life was valid for the instant it was made, but that instant is no longer there.

Here is another nice trick: A fellow says, "Well, I’m going to pretend that I committed suicide. The worst penalty that society could possibly hand me would be to kill me, so therefore the thing to do is for me to say that I have committed suicide at this time. And then anything I do in the future will not bear any worse penalty than I could inflict on myself now, so therefore I can go into the future with a free computer."

You will find some of the weirdest decisions back on people’s tracks in an effort to clear that computer. Some people will even turn around and blow their brains out just to clear the computer! That doesn’t sound very rational, but it works— it clears it!

Now, I want to recommend Conclusion Processing to you for low- level, low- toned cases. You will find that inaccessibility results from having reached too many decisions and conclusions; you try to make them reach one more decision— the decision "I have to be processed in order to get better" — and they can’t accept another decision.

The decline of an individual, the deterioration, the dwindling spiral as a person goes down the tone scale, is marked exactly to the degree that he loses his ability to make decisions without bewilderment. And his ability to make decisions depends exactly on how often he has been right with his decisions in the past and how many decisions he has had to make in the past. So those two things go side by side.

Therefore, on the surface level of any case, when you are looking for locks, this formula that I have given you is the formula that you should follow. It is a very simple thing to straightwire people to this degree.

If you find the imagination of your preclear does not answer up to a good solid level of postulate conclusions— that is to say, if you don’t seem to be able to get anyplace with it— just take a dictionary, go to A and start asking him "Did you ever decide . . ?" and then make something up out of the word. Then, "Did you ever decide. . ?" and make something else out of the next word." Did you ever decide . . ?" and make something else out of the next word. Get him to remember each time, just as you do with Self Analysis, remembering with some perceptic in order to really pin the thing down; get a perceptic with this conclusion so that you get it pinned down, and get him rolling this way. You can take a dictionary and just go from A straight on through, and you will find that a person has made a decision on practically every subject in there.

But it is pretty easy if you run starting and stopping of ARC on all dynamics. You can build yourself a little table and just call out that table. It is very simple to do.

You will find more immediate jump in tone with this process than with anything I have given you before. And for heaven’s sake, as your first subject of address on Conclusion Processing, just straightwire out all conclusions on the subject of processing, yourself and Dianetics that you have reached since the appearance of the book.

It is a remarkable thing, but you have probably had to change computation on yourself many times, until by now you have a lot of crosscomputations lying there. But you can do that Straightwire and you will immediately get a resurgence.

You can certainly go up the tone scale on this faster than with anything else I know because you are dealing with rock- bottom stuff here.